Elsevier and the University of Sydney, Australia’s leading higher education and research university, today announced the winners of the 
24-hour Sydney Hackathon .
From Saturday, September 24 to Sunday, September 25, participants developed software applications to improve delivery of scientific, medical and technical content using SciVerse Content and Framework APIs. The competition was organized through the joint effort of Elsevier, Sydney University’s School of Information Technologies and the Sydney University IT Society (SUIT).
The winning applications include:
- First place ($1,500): Tim Dawborn, Seb Pauka and James Alexander, of the University of Sydney, developed Presentify, an application that displays any SciVerse ScienceDirect article as an HTML5 presentation by automatically organizing content including section titles, images, charts and the summary text of an article.
- Second place ($1,000): Sam Thorogood, an alumnus of the University of Sydney’s School of IT, and Nicky Ringland a postgraduate at the School of IT, developed SciPlay, an application that quizzes readers of a SciVerse ScienceDirect article with questions based off of the content of that article. SciPlay also won the People’s Choice award.
- Third place ($500): The Macademia application enhances search by displaying articles and videos relevant to a user’s query. Additionally, the application enables users to comment on an article.
“The Sydney Hackathon not only tested the programming skills of participants, it tested their determination and endurance,” said James Curran, Senior Lecturer in the School of Information Technologies, University of Sydney. “Despite lack of sleep, the students and developers remained enthusiastic throughout the competition resulting in truly innovative apps for science.”
“We are very pleased with the innovative applications that were developed and excited to see the enthusiasm from the student research and developer community to develop solutions using our APIs and content,” said Rafael Sidi, Vice President Product Management, Applications Marketplace and Developer Network, Elsevier.
The Sydney Hackathon is the most recent 24-hour hackathon hosted through the joint effort of Elsevier and a university partner. Similar collaborative challenges were conducted in Singapore at the National University of Singapore (August 12 – 14, 2011), the United States at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (February 5-6, 2011) and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York (June 27-28, 2011).
SciVerse Applications and the Developer Network provide opportunities for researchers and librarians to collaborate with developers in creating and promoting new applications that improve research workflows. The Developer Network features a growing community of application developers who may gain recognition, prestige and revenue through their contributions to SciVerse Applications.
